


The Final Proof

by SilentAuror



Series: The Heart Experiment [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Character Death, Kleenex alert, M/M, POV Third Person, POV: John Watson, SO SORRY, Sussex, retirement fic, sequel to At the Heart of it All
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-06
Updated: 2014-08-06
Packaged: 2018-02-12 02:18:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2092047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilentAuror/pseuds/SilentAuror
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to <i>At the Heart of it All</i>, set late into their retirement. This time it's easier for John, though it's never easy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Final Proof

**The Final Proof**

 

“Do you remember the brains?” Sherlock asks one day, his chest growing steadily weaker. 

John is cradling him in his lap on the sofa, the waves breaking at the foot of the hill out their front window. He can’t keep his worry off his face, but he says, his voice gruff, “Of course I remember the brains. You finished the damned experiment, even though I told you you’d never have to prove your love for me in a laboratory. And then you did anyway.”

Sherlock presses his face into John’s chest, a gnarled, long-fingered hand grasping at John’s arm. “Do you remember what I said?” he asks after a moment, turning those eyes back up to John’s, as blue as they were the day they met. 

John has to clear his throat. He remembers as though it was yesterday. “You showed me the brains of the people who’d lived lives where they’d loved and been loved and told me that you wanted yours to look that way when you d – ” He stops, unable to say the word. He swallows hard. “It was the day you asked me to marry you.”

Sherlock smiles at him, his lips tremulous and still so beautiful. “And you said yes.”

“I’ll never forget,” John says softly. “Sherlock – ” His throat closes again. 

“Don’t, John,” Sherlock says, reaching up to touch his face. “Please. We’ve had years and years. Really good ones. And I’ve – cheated death – so many times – ” He coughs, grimacing slightly. “Thanks to you. But maybe this time we can’t escape it.”

“But not yet,” John pleads, aware of how futile it is. “God, please. Not yet. Don’t leave me.”

“Once promised I’d never leave you again,” Sherlock murmurs, his eyes closing. “I never have. This time it might be out of my hands, John.”

***

Sherlock doesn’t die that afternoon, as John had feared. He remains weak, though, and neither of them talk much about planning into the future or how much time he might have left. And John, four years his senior, with a five-year-old knee replacement and a heart that flutters sometimes, is going to be the one to outlive him. How is that in any way fair? Although he knows in his heart of hearts that given the choice, it has to be this way. Sherlock wouldn’t survive a day without him. But he wishes they could go together. After everything else they’ve been through, surely they could die together. It doesn’t seem fair. 

***

“The bees,” Sherlock whispers near dawn five days later, lying awake next to John in their giant, hand-carved bed. “You’ll – ”

“Of course I will,” John promises, and strokes the rough curls which are indeed rougher under his arthritic hands than they were when they were younger. He _did_ have the chance to see it all happen. To watch Sherlock grow old next to him. To watch him slowing down had been painful, but his moods had gentled with age, too. 

“Always thought I’d get myself killed sometime,” Sherlock murmurs, his fingers tightening, his arms around John, a bony ankle between John’s. “But I knew you would never forgive me. And you always saved me.”

Dawn is when they can talk about death, though any time is bad enough. But they’ve learned their lesson about not talking, about not saying the things that need saying. And now, when there’s so little time left, John won’t deny him this, these important conversations. The last requests and last promises. 

“I wish I could go with you,” he says. 

For a long moment, Sherlock is quiet. “Can’t you?” he asks wistfully, but it’s only rhetorical. John meant it literally. 

It takes him a moment to find an answer. “I would, if there was any way to know that…”

“That what?” 

John turns his head to look into Sherlock’s eyes. “That it would definitely work, that we’d be together on – on the other side, if there is another side.”

Sherlock is tactfully silent; John knows his opinions on any sort of afterlife, but something in his childhood Catholicism has always hung on when it comes to this, at least. Or perhaps it’s not that. Perhaps it’s simply that he cannot fathom being apart from Sherlock forever. That some part of what they are together won’t survive indefinitely. It has to. It _must_. “If not,” Sherlock points out, “you’d have just – died for no reason. I don’t want that.” There’s a space and then he adds, softer, “Though if there is anything else after, I’d hate that you weren’t there. I’d want to be there with you. Always.”

“Maybe you’d find someone else over there,” John says, trying to lighten things a bit. 

Sherlock pulls his head closer and kisses the top of it. “Don’t be an idiot. You know you’re all I’ve ever wanted.”

John gets himself closer and they shuffle back down under the covers, holding each other, and sleep eventually slides over them both. 

***

“Would you do something for me?” Sherlock asks, two days later. They’re in the sitting room and it’s a bit chilly, so John’s built a fire. They’re on the sofa with a blanket over their legs and Sherlock has another around his shoulders. It’s already late in April and spring has come to Sussex, but the chill of winter is not going to leave Sherlock’s bones this time. John has been listening carefully to his breathing. It grows shallower every day. 

“Of course,” he says instantly. “Anything.”

Sherlock presses his lips to John’s temple. “I want people to remember me,” he says. “And for that, they’ll need to remember you, too. Without you, I would have been nothing whatsoever.”

“Sherlock – ” John starts, but he keeps his voice gentle. “Don’t – ”

“I haven’t finished,” Sherlock interrupts. “Besides, it’s true and you know it. I want them to remember us, to know our story. Would you do that? Gather up your blog posts from all the years and make them into a book, would you? I’ve thought about this a great deal and I’ve decided: you may not die until you’ve written it. Would you do that for me, John?”

“I know what you’re doing,” John says, his throat closing. “You’re saving me again. In advance. Giving me a reason to live. I see right through you, Sherlock Holmes.” He’s trying to joke, but his voice is quavering and he can’t control it. 

“Will it work?” Sherlock asks, and turning his face to John’s, John sees that his eyes are bright with unshed tears. “I can’t leave you behind to mourn again. Not like last time.”

“I’ve forgiven you that a thousand times over already,” John says, inhaling shakily. “But yes. I’ll write it.”

“Promise?” Sherlock asks, his hand finding its way into John’s. 

“I promise,” John says, and means it with his whole heart. 

“You won’t die until – ”

John kisses him on the forehead. “No,” he says, his voice stronger. “I won’t die until I’ve written it. You have my word.”

“I love you,” Sherlock says, the tension leaving his body. “My John. I love you.”

“Stop it,” John says, the tears glazing over his eyes before he can stop himself. 

Sherlock’s lips find his and he’s weak, so terribly weak, but it’s still them, and kissing Sherlock is still as magical as it was all those years before. John swears to himself that he won’t fight it, won’t kick and scream and protest it. Everyone has to die sometime. And it will be soon. He knows that. 

Any time would be too soon. 

***

Sherlock dies the next afternoon, his head on John’s lap, hands steepled in his classic thinking position. John was reading but mostly listening to Sherlock’s breathing, when suddenly he realised that the cottage was much too quiet and Sherlock’s head was too heavy. 

At that moment, the world seems to stop on its axis. “Oh, God, no,” John breathes. And then again. “Oh, no. Sherlock. Sherlock!” He knows that Sherlock is gone even as he says it, his voice cracking the second time. The tears flood his eyes, his throat so choked it hurts as he bends over the beloved head, cradling it in his arms. He weeps and weeps and sits there for what feels like an age, feeling Sherlock’s body begin to cool as tears pour down his face. He gets onto his knees beside the sofa and kisses the marble-cool lips. Sherlock’s face is set and somehow younger than it was by ten years, his expression so calm that it’s nearly beatific. He sits there long after the point at which his knees have started to cramp, stroking the still forehead. 

Finally it occurs to him to get up. He should call someone, do something. But – and he knows how irrational it is – he doesn’t want them to take Sherlock away. He knows where Sherlock’s will is and he’ll need to have that on hand before the undertakers come. It’s on top of the hearth in their little lockbox of important documents and John gets up and goes over to it as though in a daze. With the right envelope in hand, he makes his way to the telephone and looks up the number of the village undertaker, young Bob Milford, took over the business from his father some years ago and not really young any more at all. In his fifties, probably. It doesn’t matter. John dials the number with fingers that seem thick and clumsy, and makes the last call he’s ever wanted to make in his life. 

When they come, John is sitting on a stool that he’s pulled up to the sofa and is holding the hands that Sherlock still has steepled under his chin with both of his own. Bob walks into the sitting room and takes off his hat, a gesture John senses rather than sees. “The will is on the hearth,” he says, his voice wooden and devoid of expression. “You have to read it. There’s something I have to do before the cremation, and I’ll need some help.”

“Of course, Dr Watson,” Bob says, and he’s much too gentle. John wants to say something cross. Sherlock would have. 

***

The lab technician comes out to tell John that they’re ready for him now. He goes in with a bit of trepidation, but she sees his face and tells him that the body is in one of the storage units. John won’t have to see him with the incisions on his head. 

“Where is the brain?” he asks, trying to keep his voice sounding normal. He and his cane make their way in the direction she points him and he remembers the day he met Sherlock – in a lab, with his cane. This time Sherlock hadn’t said anything derisive when he’d started using one again, after the knee replacement. 

They show him how to use the machinery, then nicely leave him alone, pointing out the office where they can be found if he needs help and moving a telephone into easy reach, since his mobile won’t work underground here. John’s brought the old file. He spreads the photographs out across the counter and remembers the way Sherlock had explained them to him, a month into their official relationship, showing the differences between the good brains and the bad brains, as he’d put it, in endearingly lay terms, for John. The bad brains belonged to the people who had died after long lives spent without love in them, with no close relatives or friends left behind. The good brains were the opposite, the brains of people who had died and been grieved by people who had loved them dearly. John looks at these photos again and feels the hole of Sherlock’s absence ache ferociously, his heart giving a stab all over again. “Oh, Sherlock,” he says aloud, softly, as if it will help. 

Never mind. He’s promised to do this. He’s read the instructions over and over again, just to be sure. It was Sherlock’s last request besides the book, left there in his will. He’d shown it to John one night and John had almost laughed but couldn’t because his chest had been so tight. “We’ll see,” he’d said. “I might not be able to… do that.” But Sherlock had said that it would be the “final proof” and stubbornly clung to that. 

“It will finally correct my old misperception about love,” he’d said, leaning into John in that way he had. Persuasion, completely unsubtle. 

John realises he’s smiling at the memory. He swallows and looks down at what he believes to be the most extraordinary brain the world has ever seen. It looks like any other brain, no larger, no smaller. He studies the first machine and then inserts the tray the way he was shown. The scan will take several minutes and John thinks of how futile this is – the scan won’t actually show anything that John doesn’t already know, and it won’t show Sherlock’s incredible, unusual brilliance or his sense of humour or the silly things he would say in bed sometimes, with all of his walls and defences down… John’s eyes go glassy again and he blinks hard and shuffles through the data files again, Sherlock’s recorded analyses of the eleven brains he’d studied. Perhaps he should see about getting this recorded posthumously, too, he thinks idly, then thinks of how he hasn’t even got the funeral all the way planned and thinks, maybe one step at a time. But Sherlock would have liked that, he thinks. 

When the machine beeps, John takes the print-out and sees the similarity to an MRI, only this is for dead tissue. He blinks, looking at it and holds up the two-dimensional diagram next to the best of the good brains. Sherlock’s looks even better, he thinks. Several minutes later when another machine prints out the photos, his thought is confirmed. The tissues of Sherlock’s brain are brighter than the others, somehow. The bad brains all look dull, greyer and darker than the good brains, and Sherlock’s looks practically like living flesh even compared to the good brains. 

John’s eyes blur again and this time he can’t help the tears escaping down his face. He pulls the brain back out of the machine in its tray and wants to kiss it, but doesn’t. “You were right,” he says to it, his voice quiet but still echoing in the empty lab. “You proved it. You loved and were loved harder than any of these. And I was the lucky bastard who got to be loved by you.” One of his tears drops onto the brain. “Can you feel that?” he asks, his voice trembling. “God, I miss you so much. I can’t believe you’re really gone.”

***

The funeral is over. People came back to the house with him and stayed for a bit. John served some refreshments that other people brought but set out some of their best honeys. Sherlock would have liked that, he thinks. The best part is Mike staying until his wife comes to take him back to the train station. They’re headed back to London. John wishes that Greg could have been there, but that’s stupid – Greg died himself, seven years ago. They’d gone to the funeral and told stories about him that would have got him fired had they been aired while he was living, and everyone had laughed a lot. John remembers Sherlock at the reception, people thinking him the life of the party, mellowed by the years and quite sociable by then. Being loved had worked wonders on him, though it hadn’t taken any of his sharp wit away. Just made him a little mellower about it. 

The cottage feels empty after Mike goes, the sun setting in the western window. A perfect early May night, yet Sherlock is gone from the world. His ashes sitting in their tasteful black urn on the hearth are no replacement. Speaking of which, John should really fulfill that part of the will about now. He’d wanted to be alone for that. But not yet. He’ll do it tomorrow. Now that he has Sherlock’s remains back with him, he doesn’t want to go to sleep without them. It’s stupid, but John refuses to scatter them just yet. 

He goes to sleep on the sofa, looking at them until his eyes, weary with grief and fatigue, shut on their own. 

The next afternoon, John takes the urn out into the garden as he’d promised both himself and Sherlock he would. His hand shakes a little as he takes off the lid. “In the garden, like you said,” he says, and tips ash into his hands, feels it crumble and slip through his fingers as he strews it around the garden. It feels surreal, that this is all that’s left of the body of the man who loved him fiercely for over forty years. Sherlock was his lover, his partner, his other half, the man who made him feel seen and observed and grounded. He had known John’s body more intimately than anyone else in the world, as John had known his. He thinks of all the times they’d been together – fast, urgent times after cases, high on adrenaline and each other, the other person’s abilities as much of a turn-on as anything else. Or the slow, lazy morning times. Their holidays, and Sherlock’s count of the cities and towns they had christened that way. The thousands and thousands of kisses they’d shared, Sherlock’s arms around him. Certain especially poignant ones stick out in his memory. A bridge in Paris on their honeymoon. A tree-lined cobbled street in a village in Germany. A rooftop restaurant in Santorini. That first, tentative one in the kitchen at Baker Street that had grown into the incredible embrace that Mrs Hudson had unwittingly interrupted. They had loved each other, body and soul and mind, expressed physically countless times, Sherlock’s body the most loved flesh in the world, surely, as familiar as John’s own or more. It’s incomprehensible that all that is left of him is crumbling ash.

John moves around the garden as though half in a dream, the sun getting into his eyes and making them water. He puts a lot of the ash near the bees and a lot near the clematis vine, with its flowers as blue as Sherlock’s eyes. Sherlock had planted it when they first moved here and fussed over it as though it were a child every winter as he covered it to protect it from frosts. When he’s covered every part of the garden, John scatters the rest near their two chairs. He feels incredibly tired and just – empty, when it’s finished, and sits down heavily in his chair. “Well,” he says to no one in particular, though he knows he’s still speaking to Sherlock, “that’s that done.” 

The sun is shining on him and it feels almost harsh. Too bright for the sort of aching loss he’s feeling. After awhile, John takes the empty urn and goes back into the house. He stares at the empty rooms and feels Sherlock’s missing presence in every one of them so strongly that it feels like his heart is being ripped out of his chest. 

How does one go on, he wonders dully to himself. When the one thing that made life absolutely phenomenally incredible is taken away, how does one go on living? 

***

There’s the book. Sherlock knew precisely what he was doing in asking John to write it. John is aware of it every time he sits down to work on it, the reminder giving him a small smile each time. Sherlock absolutely knew that he would be lost, would need _something_ to do, some reason to keep going. 

“I don’t want it to take too long, though,” he says to Sherlock one day, as he’s retyping an old blog entry into chapter format. “You’d better be waiting for me.”

The house does not respond, but then, it never does. John works until it’s well past dark, and remembers Sherlock staying up all night for cases into his late sixties, when John had put his foot down and insisted on retirement. 

He’d wondered sometimes whether Sherlock would be able to handle being retired, whether he wouldn’t get so bored and irritable that he would become a nightmare to live with, but he hadn’t. At the end of the day, he was tired. Of course, he always said that it didn’t matter how much forensic science advanced; one still needed the right mind to operate the processes and make the right instinctive leaps that were so lacking in Scotland Yard’s employees. But he’d been content enough to let it go. “I suppose I’ve caught my share of killers and criminals,” he’d said mildly as they’d inspected the cottage they’d bought the next day. “Time for someone else to start picking up the slack.”

“But there will only ever be one Sherlock Holmes,” John says to the empty sitting room. 

The silence does not answer him. 

***

He likes being out in the garden better than alone in the house. As the summer progresses, he works on the book outdoors more often. In June he develops a bad cough that does not go away, and by early July he knows that it won’t. He begins to listen to his own breathing more carefully, the way he’d done with Sherlock after Sherlock’s lungs had started to give out. 

The book waxes and grows in his fingers. The words just flow in a way that his blog posts never did. Chapters stretch out in his hands, the stories and memories coming to life again on the page. _The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson_ , he’s titled it, with the subtitle smaller underneath: _The Story of Two Men and Their Frankly Ridiculous Adventures_. He talks about the cases in vivid detail, and he talks about them. About their life. He includes the jump from Bart’s Hospital and relives it in still-vivid pain. He details the things Sherlock did in those two years away. The torture. The terrorist rings he’d exposed. The crime lords he’d deposed. All that he’d endured, and all of the reasons why. He includes Mary, and the shot that changed his life yet again. He talks about when they finally got together, and he talks about Sherlock’s experiment and his proofs. He talks about Sherlock’s death in a chapter so painful that it takes him days to be able to work on at it all, though his rests are getting longer and longer between periods of writing as it is. The pain has mellowed considerably, but it’s still difficult. 

The grief is cleaner this time, somehow. It was worse the first time. But this time, nothing had been left unsaid. All the wrongs had been righted. He’d been with Sherlock right up until the end, holding his head in his very lap. This time, Sherlock had died knowing how bloody hard John had loved him, had always loved him. And he feels this time that Sherlock is still all around him somehow, especially here in the garden. This is where John can feel his presence the strongest, and where he hopes beyond rational, logical hope that Sherlock was wrong about the existence of an afterlife, because the thought of never being with him again is more than he can cope with. 

He tends the garden and harvests a last crop of honey from their bees. He speaks with a neighbour down the lane about coming by to remove the hives and look after them, when the time comes. He updates his own will, necessarily adjusted now that Sherlock is gone. The only part that matters is that his ashes be left here in the garden with Sherlock’s. Maybe wild bees will come and cross-pollinate the clematis that Sherlock loved so much, and the honeysuckle that draws the butterflies and bees both. 

One day the book is finished, and John sends it to six publishers, thinking that they should be so lucky to even get to read the life story of the extraordinary man that Sherlock was. After he returns from the mailbox, he goes into the cottage and lies down on the sofa in the position that Sherlock was in when he died, exhausted from the walk and the emotional effort of having sent the finished book off at last. It won’t need much editing, he thinks. And if it does, some editor there can do it. He’s done what he needed to do: he wrote their story. He’s told the world who Sherlock was, and by definition, who he himself was. And it helped. He doesn’t feel a sense of closure from Sherlock and doesn’t want to – but sifting through a lifetime of memories of the two of them has helped ease the grief a little. Sherlock must have known that, too. After all, he’d been a genius. 

As the shadows lengthen across the sitting room, John falls asleep, his breathing shallow and a bit pained, but he’s stopped noticing that, particularly. 

***

The letter is open in John’s lap, complete with a cheque which is meant to be an advance on the publication fee. John feels tremendously pleased and proud that they’re going to publish it. Their story. Now the world will know Sherlock’s brilliance and his own part in it all. And the publishers have offered to have Sherlock’s brain study published, too. That part pleases John almost more. It doesn’t matter that he will never see any of it in print. There is only so much breath left in his lungs. He doesn’t need to see it on paper. The letter is confirmation enough. 

The sunlight is very warm and shining directly into his eyes, filtering through the clematis vines on the trellis. John closes his eyes a little, the letter slipping from his fingers. 

He can feel Sherlock all around him, today more strongly than ever. The bees are quieter today, somehow. But Sherlock’s presence is as tangible as the sunlight. He knows then with absolute, inexplicable certainty that Sherlock will be there, waiting for him. Knows it as surely as Sherlock ever did about one of his deductions, his many proofs. He’s there, just beyond the sun somewhere. 

Does he sleep? John isn’t sure, but when he wakes, he knows that Sherlock is there. Two of the clematis flowers have become his eyes, blue and backlit by the sun. Sherlock is holding out a hand to him. 

“Come along, John.” That voice. That dearly beloved, utterly familiar voice. Joy wells in John’s chest, warmer than the sun itself. 

“Okay,” He says. He stretches out his hand and feels the warmth enclose his, like sunlight. “I’m coming.”

*

**Author's Note:**

> I am so sorry.


End file.
